Mozilla IT & Operations

November News From the Mozilla DB Team

You may have noticed that I stopped posting the “weekly news” from the Mozilla DB Team. After going through the Operations Report Card and applying it to DBAs in OurSQL Podcast numbers 111, 112, 114, 115 and 116, I started thinking that the updates were really more like metrics, and it would better serve my own purposes better to do the updates monthly.

The purposes of doing this type of blog post are:
0) Answering “So what does a DBA do, anyway?”
1) Answering “DBA? At Mozilla? Does Firefox have a database? Why does Mozilla have databases, and what for?”
2) Showing what the DB team does for Mozilla, so that folks will understand that “just keeping things working” is actually a lot of work. It also helps compile yearly reviews of accomplishments.

We are also starting to get some metrics information. This month we started easy – number of MySQL and Postgres machines, number of unique databases (mysql, information_schema, performance_schema and test are ignored, and duplicates, like the same database on a master and 2 slaves, are ignored), and version information.

As of today, we have 9 unique databases across 8 Postgres servers in 4 clusters, with 6 being Postgres 9.0 and 2 being Postgres 9.2 – we are currently upgrading all our Postgres databases to 9.2 and expect that by the end of December all servers will be using 9.2.